Modern Art 1

1. Modernism in the arts is when creative artists reject old forms and old values. There is constant experimentation and a search for new kinds of expression. Modernism in the arts had more experimentation and more kinds of experimentation than modernism in political and social ideology because those dealt with people and were thus more li-mited. Architecture loosely unified modernism in the arts, as it was designed according to functionalism and should serve the purpose they were made for. Architects had to make their designs practical and had to throw away ornamentation. Art was popular in the United States and especially Chicago, where there was rapid urban growth and a lack of rigid building traditions.

2. Le Corbusier was a Franco-Swiss genius who insisted on functionalism and moving away from ornamentation. Louis H. Sullivan was a Chicago architect who used cheap steel, reinforced concrete, and electric elevators to build skyscrapers and office buildings without ornamentation. Frank Lloyd Wright was Sullivan’s student who built a series of new and modern houses featuring low lines, open interiors, and mass-produced building materials. Walter Gropius was a German architect who merged the schools of fine and applied arts into a single, interdisciplinary school. This Bauhaus brought together many leading modern architects, designers, and theatrical innovators. These people combined the study of fine art with the study of applied art in the crafts. It stressed functionalism and good design for everyday life, attracted many students from around the world. Ar-chitecture is a symbol of the current fad in society, which in turn is a representation of how the world is at the time. At this time, industrialization was creating disillusionment with the world, spurning new ideas, especially architectural ones.

3. After 1900, the next generation of painters was the postimpressionists or the expres-sionists because they went beyond impressionists and had more nonrepresentational, abstract character. They had desire to know and depict worlds other than the visible world of fact, such as emotion and imagination. They wanted to express a complicated psychological view of reality with emotional intensity. Form was more important than light. Vincent van Gogh painted his emotions, Paul Gauguin used expressionism to paint with tranquility and mysticism, Paul Cézanne painted with form and ordered design, Henri Matisse, painted in arrangements of color and line as well as form, Pablo Picasso pioneered cubism, and Wassily Kandinsky turned away from nature completely. Da-daism and surrealism became popular in the 1920s and 1930s. Before, art was rigid and had to conform to certain expectation. It also was mostly to glorify people and to be pretty. Now, it was flexible and was used to express meaning.

4. Composers were attracted by the emotional intensity of expressionism. They did not hold back much and expressed greater freedom. Other composers abandoned conven-tional methods and arranged sounds without creating recognizable harmonies. They abandoned traditional harmony and tonality, and they lacked unity. Atonal music is mu-sic that does not have organized tones, such as Schönberg’s twelve-tone scale in an ab-stract, mathematical pattern. Composers, like artists, were free to experiment and wanted to have different patterns.

B.
1. Moving pictures first began in the 1890s as popular novelties in peepshows and penny arcades. The first movie houses started in Los Angeles in 1902 as an experiment, but gained popularity and led to the production of short, silent action films. Movie factories began in New York and in Los Angeles after 1910. During World War I, the United States became the main force in the industry, as short, slapstick comedies and screen stars be-came popular. After World War I, the German films excelled because they were pro-tected and developed during the war and had popular support with bizarre expressionist dramas. They were short-lived, and America had drawn all the leading German talents to Hollywood and consolidated its power. Motion pictures were the main entertainment until after World War II, as they offered people a temporary escape from the hard realities of everyday life. They were also funny and cheap.

2. Guglielmo Marconi allowed radio communication to be transatlantic by being wireless. In 1904, vacuum tubes were developed, allowing the transmission of speech and music. In 1920, the first major public broadcasts of special events were made in Great Britain, such as Nellie Melba, who sang out to all of Europe. Every major country then estab-lished national broadcasting networks. In the United States, these networks were pri-vately owned and financed by advertising. Parliament set up an independent, public corporation, the British Broadcasting Corporation, in Great Britain. In other European countries, the government directly controlled the networks. By the late 1930s in Great Britain and Germany, more than 75% of households had at least one radio, with other countries not having as much ownership. Dictators like Mussolini and Hitler controlled the airwaves and reached huge national audiences with their frequent, dramatic speeches. Democratic politicians like President Franklin Roosevelt and Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin used fireside chats to gain support. Motion pictures with used as prop-aganda, as evident with Lenin who encouraged the development of Soviet film making because he viewed it essential to the social and ideological transformation of the coun-try. This indoctrination occurred in the mid-1920s, dramatizing the communist view of Russian history. Hitler used Leni Riefenstahl to make The Triumph of the Will, based on a Nazi party rally, show the Nazi rebirth and influence Nazi fanatics.

A.
1. World War I had not only revolutionized patterns of thought and culture but also dis-rupted political power. The Treaty of Versailles had established a shaky truce, and na-tional leaders had to deal with uncertainty and try to create a stable international order. Germany hated the treaty, France was fearful and isolated, Britain was undependable, the United States had turned its back on European problems, and eastern Europe was susceptible to communist Russia. The international economic situation was poor and complicated by war debts and disrupted patterns of trade. The Roaring Twenties and the subsequent Great Depression led to more disruption. Germans disliked the treaty because it was harsh and dictated and needed to be changed or removed as soon as possible. However, Germany was still potentially the strongest nation in Europe. France and Great Britain did not have the same opinions on Germany. France wanted to re-venge Germany because most of the war in the west had been fought in France, and the costs of reconstruction and of repaying war debts to the United States were high. Thus, French politicians believed that great reparations from Germany were needed. After the United States betrayed France in the treaty, France began to rely more on the repara-tion payments to hold Germany down and keep safety in France. Germany had been Great Britain’s second-best market in the world before the war, and the British saw a successful rebuild of Germany necessary to the British economy. Economist John May-nard Keynes denounced the treaty in his Economic Consequences of the Peace by saying that high reparations and harsh economic measures would reduce Germany to the posi-tion of an impoverished second-rate power and increase economic hardship in all coun-tries. The British were suspicious of France’s army, once the largest in Europe, and France’s foreign policy. Because Russia was hostile and socialist now, France could not rely on it, as well as the uncommitted Britain and the United States, and chose to sign a mutual defense pact with Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Yugoslavia against Hungary in 1921.

2. In April 1921, the Allied reparations commission announced that Germany had to pay 132 billion gold marks in annual installments of 2.5 billion gold marks. The German re-public made its only payment in 1921 and then declared a moratorium on reparations for three years, hinting that the reparation would be either reduced or eliminated. The British accepted this, but the French did not. French prime minister Raymond Poincaré challenged Germany by moving its and its ally Belgium’s armies into the Ruhr district of Germany in early January 1923. The German government ordered the people of the Ruhr to stop working and passively resist the French occupation. The French then chose to also seal of the entire Rhineland and revived plans for a separate state in the Rhinel-and. By the summer of 1923, there was rapid German inflation due to a paralyzed Ger-many and because the government began to print money to pay its bills. Inflation soared, and the savings of many retired and middle-class people were wiped out. Many Germans felt betrayed and hated the Western governments, their own government, big business, the Jews, the workers, and the communists. In August 1923, Gustav Strese-mann took control of Germany and called off passive resistance in the Ruhr and agreed in principle to pay reparations but asked for a reexamination of Germany’s ability to pay, which Poincaré accepted. He became increasingly unpopular, and moderates had gained power in Germany and France.

3. To deal with the reparations question, an international committee was established and headed by American banker Charles G. Dawes to reexamine reparations from a broad perspective. The Dawes Plan was accepted by the three main European powers, reduc-ing Germany’s yearly reparations to its economic prosperity. Germany also received large loans from the United States to promote German recovery. This plan worked, rais-ing Germany’s wealth and income by 50% from 1913 to 1929. In 1925, European leaders met at Locarno, Switzerland. Germany and France pledged to accept their common bor-der, and Britain and Italy agreed to fight France or Germany if one invaded the other. Stresemann agreed to settle boundary disputes with Poland and Czechoslovakia peace-fully, and France promised military aid if Germany attacked those countries. In 1926, Germany joined the League of Nations, and in 1928, fifteen countries signed the Kellogg-Briand Pact, condemning and renouncing war as an instrument of national policy. The states agreed to settle international disputes peacefully; however, no provisions for action in case of war occurred, but it was a positive step.

4. In 1923, communists momentarily entered provincial German governments, and in No-vember, Adolf Hitler proclaimed a national socialist revolution. Hitler’s plot to take over the government was poorly organized and easily crushed, sending him to prison to write his book, Mein Kampf. Hitler’s National Socialist party attracted only a few fanatics, and in 1928, the party only had twelve seats in the Reichstag. In Germany, a new currency was established and the economy boomed. While the moderate businessman controlled the German governments, many unrepentant nationalists and monarchists populated the right and the army. Members of the Communist party were rebellious and active and condemned the more popular Social Democrats for betraying the revolution. In France, Communists and Socialists battled for the support of the workers. France’s lea-dership of moderates allowed for the rebuilding of its war-torn northern region, but this created a large deficit and inflation. Poincaré was recalled to office, Briand was moved to minister for foreign affairs, and Poincaré slashed spending and raised taxes, saving the franc. Due to Britain’s large postwar unemployment, the state provided unemploy-ment benefits to all people and supplemented those payments with subsidized housing, medical aid, and increased old-age pensions. This was due to the Labour party and its slow implementation of revisionist socialism. In 1922, Britain granted southern, Catholic Ireland full autonomy.